Lyft acquires Pune-based startup FinitePaths

FinitePaths was set up in November 2015 with an aim to leverage technology to help people take better decisions. The app, Trail Answers helped get answers to user questions using social, local and contextual signalsPriyanka Sangani | ET Bureau | March 23, 2017, 06:31 IST

Ride-sharing app Lyft has acquired Pune-based startup FinitePaths for an undisclosed valuation. Following the acquisition, Trail Answers, the app built by FinitePaths will be shut down and the cofounders will join the Lyft team.

A statement on the FinitePaths website said: “We are proud of the people ranking and concept extraction engine we built at FinitePaths. As we were exploring the next steps for the business, we received interest from several companies in our technology and the team and we decided to find the most apt home for it.

Lyft has a grand vision to see the world where the transportation and technology brings people together, not apart. Everyone we met at Lyft was super sharp and intelligent yet so humble. The technical challenges are exciting and we believe we can make the right contributions based on our prior experience and what we have built at FinitePaths.“

FinitePaths was set up in November 2015 with an aim to leverage technology to help people take better decisions.

The app, Trail Answers helped get answers to user questions using social, local and contextual signals. Prior to setting up the company, the cofounders worked on building large-scale, distributed infrastructure and search engines for a decade each.

Vinay Kakade worked with Amazon, co-creating its CloudSearch platform and Yahoo! Research. The other cofounder, Balaji Raghavan has worked with Google in the past. The co-founders will now work with Lyft to help in expanding its infrastructure and services.

Luc Vincent, vice-president of engineering at Lyft, said: “We are very excited to have Balaji and Vinay join our team.They have extensive experience building large scale infrastructure and services. We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft, as well as helping grow the Lyft community.“

Following this acquisition, the company has stopped signing up new users and will shut down the app over the next two weeks.